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Talk:Maidens/@comment-35434444-20191007205124
I recently saw a Youtube comment on RT's most recent re-run of volume three that said, "The Four Maiden story doesn't make sense at all." To which someone replied, "It's like asking does Cinderella make sense?" sic I asked myself whether or not this person was referring to the maidens as a self-contained story that Ozpin was telling to Pyrrha, or as a feature of the wider narrative itself. As a fable it's actually somewhat tame compared to the kind of delirium with a capital DMT you see thumbing through Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales. If anything it's *too coherent* and not tedious and didactic enough to be a true fairy tale. That's not a bad thing, and if the tone of a classic fairy tales was what they were going for, they hit the nail on the head. So if this person means the former I don't know what they're talking about. Whether or not the maidens make sense more broadly remains to be seen. Volumes four and five throw out all sorts of reasons for supposing that they were tacked on at the last second --and that's before you even get into the behind-the-scenes sources and commentaries Fatman waded into -- but six demonstrated to me that Monty though things through much further ahead than anyone had predicted. (Making a case for that is several essays on it's own so just take my word on that for now.) This would imply that the real issue was the execution; Miles and Kerry had material, if not so much material that they have a hard time keeping up with it even now, but were reluctant to present any of it because they think it will spoil some kind of dramatic reveal they're not sure how to set up only to further undermine their own confidence in the process by fucking it up, leading them to delay making good on the material even more and so the entire plot has just been constantly regressing into the future. Leaving a vapid toothgrinding slog in its wake. If nothing else I think an idea analogous to the maidens existed at the time they were added to the story, ill conceived across numerous other dimensions though it was. Having straightened that out at the back of my mind as the preamble to what follows, something else occurred to me: The four maidens pertain to the four fragments of Ozpin's power that he gave away. The question is, what the hell are the fragments? Since the maidens were introduced, it hasn't been lost on anyone that the number four is significant in RWBY and that the maidens bore some kind of connection to the relics, but this connection turned out to be much more tentative than we were expecting. The maidens serve as the keys to the vaults housing the relics, but that just seems to be Because they're pieces of Ozpin and Ozpin was the one who sealed them there to keep Salem out. When Salem leads her army against the gods, the Dark Brother specifically states that the attacks they used against him were his own power. What isn't clear is whether or not destruction is a discreet power or an aspect of nature: If a person from Remnant does something mundane like smashing a coffee cup, is this him utilizing his divine gift from the Dark Brother? Or is does he physically have to be holding Beerus's butterknife of destruction and make a nuclear explosion shoot out of it for it to count? -- Obviously not because it's not clear that the relic existed as physical artefacts until Ozpin was revived from the dead and rejoined the cycle of birth and dead as a bodhisattva to redeem Salem. Are the relics discrete physical objects, or abstract concepts? Like I mentioned, this distinction is hinted at but never made. The way Djin has the function of answering questions implies the former. But the very concept of the relics is too etiological to be a coincidence. Could they be both?; Having a specific function in addition to investing man with the qualities he needs to interface with the world? But if that's the case, the magic power Ozpin gave to the maidens was some other kind of power the gods made long before that. Where does the power of the relics end and man's own power begin? Where did the magic go? Presumably it was wiped out in the deluge, but then how did Salem preserve her own powers? She was at ground zero. You could argue that the Dark Brother can laser-guide his 破壊because he's god and everything, but I think it's because magic is actually a property of the way the gods themselves interact with the world. So once they left, no more magic people were born even though humanity eventually recovered . When Salem demonstrates her magic power in her original form, four big glowie orbs come out along with six smaller orbs. Do the big ones pertain to an aspect of her innate magic? or to the four divine gifts? From a mythological perspective it makes sense for the relics to not be in play because, under the rules of real life genesis myths, time hasn't started yet because man doesn't achieve sentience until the world is more or less fully formed and paradise is lost. But at the same time it's also fair to argue that the four relic represent the four limbs of the human psyche. Before man was self aware, he wasn't aware of the distinction between the world within his mind and the world outside himself, so even though the unconscious processes where there, there was no need to comprehend them in any particular image, hence the Dark Brother is able to talk of his "gift" even though the physical manifestations of the relics didn't exist at the time. (As an aside, the relic of Choice, to me, is debilitating rather than empowering because you only have the sensation of making a choice when you don't know what to do. If you were all knowing, you would never have to make a choice because you would always know what to do next. Choice was what prevented Pyrrha from becoming the Fall Maiden. If she knew beyond question that she had to do it then she would never have put it off. But because she had a choice she was impaled by anxiety.) To make matters more confusing, Ozpin just so happened to have four children that all just so happened to be wee little maidens. As much as I would hate for what I find to be such a fascinating part of the story to just burst into flames, it might actually be a blessing if the four super-powered god children somehow died in that explosion because it would stamp out all possible conflation with the first...er...second set of maidens. In conclusion, what we know of the maidens right now is a clear reverberation of the four-fold motif we've seen, but there isn't any kind of rhyme or reason to it yet. It could honestly go either way. They have a token purpose within the plot now, sure, but that doesn't make the mythology behind them feel any less tacked on since they resemble, but don't quite fit into, anything else thematically. We just have to accept that Ozpin gave away his irreplaceable godlike powers one day because he was bored and drunk and hadn't seen a woman since he'd secluded himself indoors for half a lifetime. It would be one thing if giving away the power served some tangible purpose towards saving Salem or preserving humanity, but there just isn't a single shred of evidence to suggest Ozpin did anything except screw himself in the ass with this pathetic venture, poetic though it was.